Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once
offered a bit of advice to a youngster whose
ambitions included a seat in Parliament. "The first
lesson that you must learn," he told the chap, "is
[that] when I call for statistics about the rate
of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer
babies died when I was prime minister than when
anyone else was prime minister. That is a political
statistic."
-Government
by the Numbers: Reliable or Not? (K. Daniel Glover, Intellectual
Capital)

First when Bill Greider published the story The
Education of David Stockman (Bill Greider, The Atlantic, December 1981)
and then when this memoir came out, Reaganites, supply-side ideologues,
gleeful Democrats and the Press focussed mainly on the palpable sense of
betrayal conveyed by the insider accounts of budgeteering in the Reagan
Administration. David Stockman's angst ridden confessions were read
mainly as an admission that the whole Reagan economic program had been
a knowing hoax, which even it's architects knew to be unworkable.
This is indeed a part of the tale and folks will be arguing about the accuracy
of this thesis for years to come. Democrats and Republicans have
such a vested interest in the debate that it seems unlikely that these
discussions can ever produce much of a consensus. Your view of it's
truth or falsity is likely to be inextricably tied up in your political
allegiance, so there's little point in trying to change anyone's mind at
this late date.

However, there is a much more important story here, a cautionary tale
that conservatives missed as a result of their visceral anger. The
real core of the Stockman story, which should be obvious from the title,
is how the political process inevitably corrupts even the most coherent
and popular conservative programs. This is so because they ask the
impossible, or at least the extraordinarily unlikely, that bureaucrats
and politicians surrender some measure of their power and their control
over our lives and that the politicos make some constituents unhappy.
In the case of the Reagan Revolution, Stockman does an excellent job of
demonstrating how even Republicans refused to make the kind of cuts in
government spending which would have been required to balance the budget.
When it came time to make the tough cuts, Stockman found himself boxed
in. On one side you had the Congressional Democrats who opposed all
cuts in spending, and always will. On another side, you had the bureaucrats
who didn't want their department's budgets reduced and never will--after
all, how many people are really willing to threaten their own jobs even
when they realize that they are useless or superfluous. On the third
side you had Congressional Republicans who simply could not withstand the
withering barrage of rhetoric that the Left unleashed about how the GOP
wanted to starve women, children and the old. And finally, Ronald
Reagan himself, who had spent almost thirty years campaigning against big
government, proved unwilling when push came to shove to actually reduce
the size of the Federal Government. Even for him, the protestations
of those who receive government largesse, outweighed the intellectual understanding
that such payments are wasteful and counterproductive. The case of
President Reagan illustrates why government programs, once instituted,
are almost never ended. There is almost never as impassioned and
vocal a constituency opposed to spending on a program as there is benefiting
from it. One of the rare cases since the beginning of the Social
Welfare State was the Welfare Reform bill, where average taxpayers finally
came to so resent payments to the unemployed that it actually was possible
to make some minute changes in our welfare policies. But, of course,
even in this instance, spending wasn't reduced.

Unfortunately, when faced with this disappointing reality Stockman and
his allies in the Administration (Baker, Darman, etc.) and on the Hill
(Domenici, Dole, etc.) tried to follow the dictates of conscience, rather
than joining battle with the forces which caused the situation. Even
though he understood intuitively that big government was in itself a threat
to freedom and the economy, Stockman decided that in the absence of the
required cuts the administration should support increased taxes as a means
of reducing the deficit. Sure there's something noble about this
willingness to "do the right thing" even at the expense of abandoning closely
held beliefs, but it also betrays a fundamentally naive understanding of
politics. Democrats understand well that if they engage in a sufficient
level of hyperbolic demagoguery then Republicans will always fold and go
along with more spending and more taxes. That's is a simple matter
of political expediency.

But this was one of those rare instances where the GOP actually had
the whip hand. The economy had been driven into the tank by the accumulated
weight of forty years of New Deal and Great Society spending along with
the expense of the Cold War. Reagan had campaigned and won on the
need to cut government, cut taxes and win the Cold War. The tax cuts
and increased military spending had been passed. But because the
accompanying budget cuts were not made, the deficit was about to explode
out of control. Someone was going to have to back down, but the GOP
was in an extremely strong position. They held both the Senate and
the Presidency and they'd already taken the political hit for proposing
budget cuts. The only thing that remained was to earn that political
damage by actually making the cuts. But thanks to Stockman and company
they instead got the worst of both worlds--Democrats got their taxes back
and Republicans were perceived as uncaring budget slashers anyway, despite
not actually getting any of the cuts.

Had conservatives better understood the real lesson of this book they
could have won the 1995 budget confrontation with President Clinton, when
they were in an even better position. The economy was in the middle
of the long Reagan/Bush/Clinton expansion. Republicans held both
the House and Senate, where the budgets are actually written, and the President
was relatively unpopular. This was a golden opportunity to make genuine
reductions in the Federal Budget, to finally start reducing the size of
the Federal Government. They started out okay, sending Clinton some
reasonably aggressive budget bills and eagerly embracing Clinton's government
shutdown. But then, when the Press and Democrats predictably attacked
them for the shutdown, Republicans folded again. The result?
They didn't get their cuts, but they did sustain the political damage of
the Left's attacks on them as Scrooges. What the heck is the point
of having the entirely justified image of the anti-government party if
you aren't going to actually reduce the size of government? If you're
going to talk the talk, walk the walk, and let the chips fall where they
may.

While it offers an instructive portrait of the genuinely disgusting
budget process, this is not a great book. There is entirely too much
axe-grinding, score-settling and self-justifying going on here. Stockman's
view of events is so personal that he seems unable to perceive the bigger
picture. Perhaps it is a function of being a glorified accountant,
but he is so concerned about the debits and the credits that he loses sight
of the reason why the business exists in the first place. The business
here is the US Government and Stockman's original principles, when he was
a maverick supply-sider in the House, were right. Government is too
big and it takes too much of our money. Both of these warp the health
of our economy and retard growth. The fact that he went over to the
enemy and advocated that taxes be raised, offers an illuminating but disheartening
lesson, one which conservatives ignore to their own detriment.